Across Time
by The Grynne
Summary: She does not belong here. Future!John and Cameron.


Future!John, Cameron. PG. She doesn't belong here.

_How many are there  
who heartless destroy,  
and think their destruction a start?_  
- Shmu'el Hanagid, "It's Heart That Discerns"

* * *

**Across Time**

At rest, she still looks like she could be one of them.

Foundlings,_ Angels_, children of the apocalypse, small, hypogaeous flowers seeded in concrete, strong in tenacity, their iron-grey beauty a miraculous and incalculable treasure. Their future; his own sons and daughters. The oldest of the generation no more than sixteen.

John stops his palm above the machine's bark-brown, ash-mangled hair, just short of touching the motionless thing, and wonders what manner of a mind could have sent this to kill him. And to what end.

* * *

The first thing he does, after wiping its sensory and mission databases, is give it a name. 

'You're Cameron.'

'I am a TOK715.'

'Nevertheless, you're now called Cameron. The only Cameron that I know.'

It tilts its head, maintaining eye contact whilst speaking, as it was programmed to do. 'I have no current mission profile that requires me to take on an alias. Without a mission, there is no reason for me to be activated.'

He pulls over a chair and sits facing her.

How does a human communicate with a machine? Could the brush of fingers on a keyboard, the stroke of a mouse, the pressing down of a red button transgress in a way that numbers and symbols cannot?

'Cameron –' When his hand reaches out to rest on her shoulder, he feels – rather than sees – her blink. 'Do you want me to put you on standby?' he asks.

For nearly a minute, he waits for a reply. Imagines her searching for an instruction: what to do in the absence of instructions.

'Cameron?' he says again. A little anxious, now, though his voice hides it. She has been programmed to obey him, but this has to be her choice.

'No.'

'No?'

'I do not want you to put me into standby.'

He forces himself to stay calm, not giving any signals. She is still watching him closely. Blue eyes seeing more than their ability to interpret. He mirrors her empty gaze back at her. When she frowns, he does precisely the same, without emotion. Until she realises what he is doing.

'What is it you want me to do, John?'

'Listen. Learn. Can you do that?'

She hesitates. 'To what purpose?'

_To infect Skynet. To be his soul and opposite. Prevent Judgment Day._

'I'll tell you later. Can you do that?'

'Yes.'

'Are you sure?'

'Yes,' she says, more firmly. Like one of his daughters, one of his sons. 'I can do that.'

* * *

He expects it to be hard, when the time comes, to send her back. Send her away, in effect – to a boy who will never have to grow up to be him – to a different, better future, one with no place for him in it. 

Hard for her, the evacuee, his gift to his other self; harder for him.

Will he cease to exist, he wonders, if the plan succeeds? Or is he trapped in this present, this unchangeable, stalemate present, doomed to never know his action's consequences?

Either way, he will never see her again.

He delays the inevitable, keeping her steadily by his side. His bodyguard, on the face of it. The truth he shares with no one because no one would understand. He teaches her many things, about himself and about the others; he explains the hostility she is met with, and he tells her to be wary.

But her education is incomplete. There are things that he cannot teach her.

A symphony; the taste of salmon. The scent of wild grasses that stretch all the way to the horizon. What the world was like when humans did not all hate and fear machines. He needs her to know these things for herself. To value them, for herself.

* * *

It speaks to how far they have come that Cameron knows it too. One day she says: 

'You have to let me go, John. I don't belong here.'

She notes his expression, the sudden jump in his pulse. She is upsetting him. Cameron overrides the impulse to desist. Human beings are complex; their desires so often contradictory. She must be practical for the both of them.

'You never told me what my purpose was, John. You don't need to."

She modulates her voice, softening it so it is like a child's.

'But you need to let me go,' she says.

Then she waits, listening to him breathing; to the heartbeat as deeply etched into her consciousness as her own name. Until he bows his head, bent over with tiredness for no apparently reason, and surrenders to her.

THE END

_6 March 2008_


End file.
